Workers stand outside an 11-story building that houses the Tung Hai Sweater Ltd. factory and apartments after a fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh. / Ismail Ferdous, AP

by USA TODAY

by USA TODAY

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) - A fire broke out in an 11-story building housing a garment factory and apartments in Bangladesh's capital, killing at least eight people, officials said Thursday.

The fire started Wednesday night, not long after the up to 300 workers at the Tung Hai Sweater Ltd. factory went home for the day, fire official Nazrul Islam said. It burned parts of the first and second floors, which housed the factory, and parts of the third, which housed apartments.

By early Thursday, firefighters had found eight people dead, Islam said. It was not immediately clear how many of the dead were tenants of the building.

The fire comes just two weeks after a factory building housing garment factories collapsed in Bangladesh, killing at least 892 people and again raising concerns about safety measures in the country's $20 billion garment industry. A fire at a garment factory in November killed 112 people.

Bhajan Kumar Sarkar, another fire official, said the managing director of the factory that burned Wednesday night, Mahbubur Rahman, and a police official were among the dead. All the dead had been found in the stairwell, he said.

Sarkar said they took more than three hours to take the blaze under control.

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